Paper Short Abstract:

In contrast to the lyric orientation of much "anthropoetry," this presentation explores the possibilities of epic poetry (or what I call “minor epic”) as a mode attuned both to the worldly ephemerality of passing moments and to the cosmic changefulness of which they afford fleeting intimations.

Paper Abstract:

Anthropologists who have turned to poetry have often claimed to do so as a means of accessing emotional registers of which conventional academic prose is unable to avail. In other words, poetry is tacitly conflated with lyric poetry, today probably the most widely practiced poetic genre, and one associated in particular with the expression of inner feelings and subjectival states. Lyric poetry, however, is not the only kind of poetry. Epic is arguably the most ancient form of poetry, extending back beyond the advent of writing and taking as its subject matter not just the actions of gods, rulers, and heroes, but also in some cases the origins of the cosmos. Unlike lyric poetry (that has tended to direct its gaze inward) epic poetry, as British poet Alice Oswald has recently suggested, propels us “beyond the voice, beyond the mind, out in the pure, unsupervised space.” Since the nineteenth century the epic form has sometimes been appropriated for nationalist political ends, to provide an immemorial ground for a political community often envisioned in narrowly exclusionary terms. Yet epic also provides a potential challenge to such narrowness. Part manifesto and part collage of my own and others’ words and images, this presentation proposes and enacts a mode that I call “minor epic” as an alternative to both ethnonationalist triumphalism and lyric introspection. This involves a simultaneous attunement to the worldly ephemerality of passing moments and to the cosmic changefulness of which they afford fleeting intimations.